Advanced Western Lit 101
A reader’s paradise blooms in the Los Angeles desert
NOBODY in Los Angeles reads books, right? They’re all just running up and down Sunset Boulevard, thrusting scripts at producers. It’s a coming-of-age story about a young woman who discovers the meaning of love at an ISIS training camp....
Does that sound true to you? If so, you probably haven’t been to the Last Bookstore. Located on the still-gritty stretch of downtown, the Last Bookstore is a potent symbol of the resurgent literary fortunes of Los Angeles. It also has become one of the finest independent bookstores in the nation, rivaling acknowledged greats like the Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle), Pegasus Books (Berkeley, California), Politics & Prose (D.C.) andtattered Cover (Denver).
The Last Bookstore is now the subject of a 12-minute documentary by Chad Howitt that focuses on Josh Spencer, who opened his first store in 2009. He’d been selling books online for about a decade, as he continued to struggle with the aftermath of a 1996 car accident that robbed him of the ability to walk. It proved surprisingly successful, allowing Spencer to open a store that was more than just a domain name. “I think that the digital age has made print books more popular, in a weird way,” Spencer says in the documentary, Welcome to the
Last Bookstore, which has him going through boxes of used books and doing fatherly things with his young daughter. “It’s just made everyone come out of the woodwork who wants to see books survive.”
Now in its second location, the Last Bookstore occupies the vast ground floor (as well as parts of the second) of the CrockerCitizens National Bank building, selling about 250,000 titles, according to store manager Katie Orphan, who estimates that there are another 200,000 titles in a warehouse. About 80 percent of those, she believes, are used. While the selection at the Last Bookstore is impressive, it’s the setting that stands out, an airy and grandiose chamber at once comfortable and whimsical, with a tunnel fashioned out of books and two vaults turned into reading rooms.
The Last Bookstore is a sign that while the days of Charles Bukowski pulling up to the King Eddy Saloon are long gone, plenty of readers and writers call Los Angeles home. What’s more, they’re creating something many thought was inimical to this city of freeways and strip malls: a genuine community. The Los Angeles Review of Books, for example, has in many ways outfoxed its graying New York competitor. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a vibrant rebuke to outdated L.A. -as-cultural-wasteland cliches,” citing wildly popular young-adult novelist John Green and actress Cameron Diaz as supporters, along with some guy named Tom Hanks. Unlike San Francisco and New York, Los Angeles is a big, thrumming city where an artist can still afford to live.
The Last Bookstore may be the final gasp of the printed book or the resurgence of the same, as well as confirmation that reading Ulysses on an iphone is not quite the experience we hoped it would be. “I’ve lost things in my life much more traumatic than a business,” says Spencer near the conclusion of Welcome to the Last Bookstore. “No fear.”